Followers

I’m glad to see that Twitter got some love this week. It wasn’t looking good, when it was announced that the royal wedding would not be live-Tweeted and that an actor in the Facebook movie The Social Network, Armie Hammer’s grandfather personally knew Prince Charles.

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But then Osama bin Laden got whacked and Twitter got pushed to the front of the social network line, thanks to a neighbor guy who was up late, bored out of his skull, and itching to use his fly-swatter references.

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I’m happy for Twitter, but I’m still not a huge fan. I don’t like #s and RTs and I only barely tolerate @s. Plus Twitter is based solely on mutual back-scratching: Unless you’re famous and funny, no one really reads your tweets. They only follow you so that you’ll follow them. Everyone’s posting and counting followers and no one’s reading. I’d be kidding myself if I thought that PetGroomerie really gives a rat’s ass about me. He follows 1,328 people, a motley crew of personal trainers, singers, marketing execs and a self-proclaimed “guy with a desk.” And me. I’m going to have to tweet the next coming of Jesus to stand out among his followees.

Isn’t it funny that the guy who accidentally Tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden’s house, Sohaib Athar, now has 102,916 followers? (Woop, just checked again and it’s now up to 103,391.) The raid only took 40 minutes and now he just lives in a regular neighborhood with a mansion that is screwing with the property values. By the time we knew who we should be following, we were left with the scraps. Give him some credit, Athar is really scrambling to make it worth your while - Yesterday he posted a cell-phone photo of a rabbit with this comment: “A guy who used to live in la Den gave this bunny (two in fact) to a neighborhood kid.”

LinkedIn was watching from the sidelines and said, Hey, we can play at this game, too. We’re important! We’re relevant! On today’s LinkedIn home page was this headline: WHOOPS: HP Exec Spills Huge Company Secret on LinkedIn Profile. But it was just something about cloud computing and block storage, which put me in a boredom coma before I was through the third paragraph. That’s just sad.

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And then there’s MySpace. Whoever took over for Tom appears to have had his headphones on while the world was being turned upside down. The MySpace home page features a photo of Will Ferrell kissing a man, Chris Brown, and Saoirse Ronan (Who? “She just nabbed the lead in a Stephanie Meyer’s [sic] movie.” OK, again, Who?) MySpace tells me to “get your dance on!” What’s Trending? Lindsay Lohan, Justin Beiber, Thor, and Conan O’Brien’s Beard. Breaker breaker, whoever runs MySpace, wake up and pick up a newspaper.